Page 32 - American Conservative September/October 2015

Economy
What Middle Class?
How bourgeois America is getting recast as a proletariat
by MARIAN KESTER COOMBS
Everyone loves the middle class. Everyone claims to be middle-class—some to put a gloss on their sketchy escutcheons, others to dodge chastisement for their awkward
riches. But in fact both the socioeconomic real- ity and the concept of the middle class have been turned on their heads and, at the same time, trivi- alized into a mere lifestyle choice.
Economically, the middle classes were once pro- prietors, self-employed owners of property and their own labor. Morally, they were the equivalent of “solid citizens”: decent, hard-working, law-abid- ing, temperate, proper, staid, virtuous, and—well, moral. The qualifications for being middle class have gotten a whole lot looser, to say the least.
The European term “middle classes” originally served to describe merchants, tradesmen, investors, and skilled craftsmen. The habitat of these classes was the walled city—the burg, bourg, or borough— hence their appellation, les bourgeois. The bourgeoi- sie occupied a middle ground between the nobility and the lower classes of peasants and servants.
As the historian Eugene Genovese used to say, “The bourgeoisie has been rising for about 500 years. They basically had to muscle in on the lords.” Two major traits defined this new class as it emerged from the chaotic end of feudalism: a close associa- tion with money (capital), banking, and investment, and their social independence. Their city walls, their gold, their commercial alliances, their education, and their skills defended them from the rapacity of the nobles, to the point where they could evolve into the leading citizens of a different kind of society.
As G.D.H. Cole and Raymond Postgate write, in 32 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
The Common People: 1746–1946, about the after- math of the battle of Culloden, at which the forces of bourgeois Britain triumphed over their Jacobite enemies:
This extinction of the older society completed a process started long before, a process which alone made it possible for Britain in the next hundred years to become the workshop of the world. There were now no feudal lords to be conciliated or cajoled by the rising employ- ing class. Land-owners, bankers and employ- ers, each with their own type of property to support them, made their political bargain- ing and conducted their trading without any semi-baronial powers, private jurisdictions or infeodated supporters camped threateningly in the countryside.
Prior to the Revolution, France’s Etats-généraux comprised the clergy, the aristocracy, and the peo- ple—i.e., everyone else. After 1789 the bourgeois element of the people—a serious and truly revolu- tionary class—came to the fore and used the rage of the sans-culottes and the foule to wipe out the aristocrats. George Rudé’s The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England 1730–1848 relates many instances of the doomed peasant and cottage-industrial classes—“the hard and black hands”—rising up to demand restoration of their ancient feudal rights, only to be suppressed by the bourgeoisie once property came under attack.
Marian Kester Coombs writes from Crofton, Maryland.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015